Issue:
October 2026
How social media users like Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper are fueling xenophobia online
In late October 2025, shortly after Prime Minister Takaichi took office and announced her Cabinet, a viral claim spread on X (formerly Twitter) that Japan had created a new ministry that would be carrying out “mass deportations” of foreign residents. Posts received millions of views. The entire claim was fake news, easily disproven by a quick search of Japanese news sources, but it spread like wildfire among non-Japanese speakers.
Fake news is nothing new but there was an interesting aspect to this claim: it originated with a popular X user who presented himself as a Japanese nationalist living in Yokohama, but was actually a foreign man living in the U.K. He posts under the pseudonym “Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper” and presents himself as a “Japanese” conservative voice to his followers, who number more than 105,000.
Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper is an unusually clear example of a broader problem on X: accounts with fabricated identities can buy into Elon Musk’s blue checkmark “verification” system and function as profitable outlets for pseudo-journalism, supplying overseas audiences with supposedly authentic information they cannot independently verify.
Users like Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper engage in what internet users refer to as “LARPing” – pretending to be someone they are not for the purpose of receiving attention (the term originated with live-action role-playing, but is now widely used by younger generations to refer to online fakery). The content of their posts, which is often inflammatory, usually differs considerably from the views commonly held by the type of person they are LARPing as.
When I wrote my 2021 book “Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age,” the Japanese internet right focused almost all of its hostility on Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese left. Many of the nationalists I researched remain fixated on topics related to China and South Korea, two nations that serve as the source of a large percentage of Japan’s immigrants. However, X accounts claiming to be English-speaking Japanese nationalists often seem aimed at creating an impression that Japan is seeing an overwhelming wave of Islamic migration. Such posts appeal greatly to right-wing internet users in the Anglosphere, but do not reflect the actual situation in Japan, where a small minority of immigrants are Muslim[TH1] . At the end of 2024, the number of foreign-born Muslims in Japan was about 360,000, nearly double the figure four years earlier, according to the Mainichi Shimbun, quoting the Japan Muslim Survey Project.[TH2]
The posts by such accounts feed larger, right-wing English-language accounts in the U.K. and the U.S. that posit Japanese xenophobia as a virtue, and wish that their own nations pursued immigration policies based on ethnic and cultural purity. Consumed with anger and fear over social media posts about the Muslim minorities in their own countries, they imagine Japan as a nation that is successfully rejecting immigration and multiculturalism.
The Colonel has spent years building an online identity as a patriotic half-British, half-Japanese resident of Yokohama who wants to protect his country from the dangers of immigration that supposedly ruined the U.K. and other Western nations. Indeed, he became a popular X user posting about Japanese news in English. However, the frequency with which he posted erroneous information and mistranslated Japanese led many to suspect he was not Japanese. His posting schedule also suggested that he was residing in a European time zone. He responded to the allegations by insisting he worked the night shift at a specific FamilyMart convenience store in Yokohama.
The Colonel was exposed as a LARPer in August 2024 when a Japanese resident of Tokyo who posts on X under the pseudonym Arin Yuni called for an in-person meeting to see proof. A meeting was agreed upon at a park near the FamilyMart where Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper claimed to work. Arin arrived at the agreed time and found no one there. He then went to the nearby convenience store and questioned staff, but none of them knew of a half-British employee.
Documentation of what had occurred was posted on X and Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper responded by posting an admission that he was not actually Japanese. He declared himself “deeply ashamed of being British” and claimed he pretended to be a Japanese person out of a desire to protect Japan from becoming a “lost country” like the U.K. Although he wrote that “95% of all happy memories in my life involve Japan in some ways,” he notably did not claim to have ever visited or lived in the country. Instead, his connection to Japan had been built through popular culture such as video games and music.
Arin Yuni, whom I interviewed about the incident, recalled that he initially viewed the confession as a resolution to the problem. He encouraged his followers to stop posting about the Colonel because “as far as I was concerned, he had confessed, and I genuinely thought we were finally getting somewhere.”
However, the next day, the admission was deleted and replaced with a claim by the Colonel that his account had been hacked. He returned to making anti-immigrant posts and avoided responding to the evidence that he is not actually Japanese. Despite his confession, the number of his followers more than tripled over the next two years.
Unlike traditional news media, X has practically no accountability for users spreading fake news or LARPing. As long as they have enough followers willing to repost their content, they will have a large audience. This seems to be especially true of users who have an ideological affinity with Elon Musk’s anti-immigration views. Musk’s account monetization system [TH4] has allowed users who post viral anti-immigration content to generate thousands of dollars in monthly income. Musk’s views on freedom of speech include the freedom to earn advertising revenue from posts that might be flagged and censored as misinformation or hate speech on other platforms.
“When you have a large audience that genuinely believes what you post, you have some responsibility to think about what that audience might do with that information,” Arin Yuni said, voicing concern about the consequences of the Colonel’s antics. “If this continues escalating, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry that eventually someone could get physically hurt.”
X has allowed someone with no connection to Japan and no accountability for repeated falsehoods to present themselves as an authentic Japanese voice. If their posts generate anger, fear, and engagement, the platform provides generous rewards rather than punishments.
This is one of the consequences of Musk’s vision of “citizen journalism.” Musk has repeatedly argued that social media can bypass traditional mainstream media and allow ordinary people to report information directly to the public.
In principle, that can make public discourse more open. But this also removes many of the mechanisms that make journalism accountable: editors, corrections, professional reputations, and the expectation that a reporter is who they say they are.
For people who actually live in Japan, the danger is not just that people outside of the country are being fooled into believing fake news. Inflammatory and false posts about immigrants, Muslims, foreign crime, and government policy can circulate back into Japan, influence political discussion, and fuel the spread of xenophobia.
The story of Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper demonstrates how easily it is to amass authority online, particularly when users confirm the expectations of a receptive audience. In such an environment, visibility is easily mistaken for expertise, and engagement for credibility. Although many mainstream media outlets frequently debunk the fake news spread by such individuals, there are still millions of X users who are treat them as reliable citizen journalists. Elon Musk appears to be happy with this state of affairs.
Jeffrey J. Hall is a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies and the author of “Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age”
